In March 1994, John Paul II, the former pope, granted an audience to Ms. Nafis
Sadik, then undersecretary of the UN Conference on Population and
Development. They met to discuss the agenda for the U.N.
International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo. In
an argument about the proposed recognition by the United Nations of women’s
unrestricted reproductive rights, the pope categorically rejected the
proposal: “In the field of family planning individual rights
are not an issue. There are only the rights of married couples!”1,
declared the Pontiff.

Ms Sadik insisted that the matter had to be addressed, as domestic
violence was on the rise and women often became pregnant unwillingly.
John Paul II burst out angrily, "Don't you think that the
irresponsible behavior of men is caused by women?"2

The
Polish pope considered the family as the sanctuary and the heart of
the culture of life, which should be defended by any means in the
face of the West's
“culture
of death", which he
saw as the ultimate expression of its profane evil. He deplored
liberal democracies, where people, men and women, feel free and have
the right to choose whether they want to have children, what type of
lifestyles they wish to pursue, or whether they want to remain in an
abusive marriage or seek a divorce.

The pope’s views of the family and individual rights of its members
were not a novelty. They had shaped oppressive, patriarchal cultures
for ages, but in Poland, where John Paul II is still a cult figure,
they have played and still play a particularly pernicious role. The
idea of “sacred family” endowed with supreme rights has
been delivered and preached countless times in writing and orally by
the pope himself and by thousands of his followers: preachers and
teachers, ultra-catholic politicians, judges, journalists and
moralists: in schools, in the parliament, in courts, in the media and
from the pulpits of the churches all over the country. It has
permeated our minds and lives so deeply that today, having a family,
any family, is the main goal and the highest value declared by the
majority of the Polish people. Individual rights, personal liberty
and fulfillment are mostly not taken even into account.

Familism and democracy

Poland differs from democratic
states in many ways, including the way it adheres to the principle of
the rule of law and to most other democratic and liberal principles.
Polish state may respect the constitution, international treaties or
domestic laws on condition, however, that they are compatible with
the so called social teachings of the Catholic Church. For this
reason alone, in 2007, Poland opted out from the
European Charter
of Fundamental Rights, as its full adoption might clear
the way for gay and lesbian marriage equality in Poland.

The
laws protecting women’s rights, particularly those that can
undermine the “family collective”, seem to be equally
reprehensible to God and his-or-her local representatives, so in this
field too, the state, its institutions and agencies give priority to
the Catholic agenda. In a recent case from the town of Chodel in
southern Poland, a woman was murdered by her husband who had abused
her for many years and threatened to kill her on numerous occasions.
The man, who had been just released from a pre-trial detention
center, has tried to justify himself by accusing his wife of
infidelity, which proved to be a very effective line of defense. A
local woman prosecutor, who has taken up the case, has ordered to
take and examine the sample of the tissue from the womb of the dead
woman to look for traces of other man’s sperm. “She was
not saintly!” – explained the prosecutor.

Theory and practice

In
theory, domestic violence is classified as a criminal offense under
Article 207 of the Polish Penal Code, but the violence must be
repetitive in order to be punished. Moreover, law enforcement and
criminal justice officials do not generally treat domestic violence
seriously. The commentary to Article 207 indicates expressly that it
seeks to protect the family above all else: individual rights to
life, health, freedom, and bodily integrity are of only secondary
concern. As one Łódź-based police officer reported, “the most
important crimes are robbery, rape, murder and assault –
certainly not domestic violence.”3
A police officer in Warsaw agreed, remarking, “In Poland, if
you rate domestic violence on a scale of one to ten with one being
the most important and ten being the least, it’s a ten.”
Such attitudes, prevalent among many members of Polish society,
reflect the belief that a crime committed between intimate partners
is less serious than the same crime committed between unrelated
persons.

Some
police officers reported being frustrated by domestic violence cases,
as they rarely result in punishment for the offender. This opinion is
strongly supported by a number of studies which found that although
the number of cases of domestic violence that have been reported to
the police has significantly increased in recent years, there is a
growing tendency among the state prosecutors to refuse to instigate
or to discontinue the criminal proceedings, mostly under Article 17
par. 1 (2)(3) of the Code of Criminal Proceedings, stipulating that
“the proceedings shall not be instituted, or, if previously
instituted, shall be discontinued, when the act does not possess the
qualities of a prohibited act (…), or when it causes minimal
social harm.”4

In
2000, among 34 837 cases of mistreatment under Article 207, par. 1, the prosecution was discontinued in 13 504 cases – in 90 percent of
cases under Article 17 par. 1(2) of the Code of Criminal Proceedings, which means that according to
prosecutors, there had been no grounds to instigate the proceedings
in the first place. In 2005, the number of terminated cases was even
higher (about 50 percent) – 80 percent of them on the same
grounds.5

Particularly disturbing was the increase in the number of the cases dismissed
under Art207 par.2,3
(if the perpetrator acta with extreme cruelty and if the victims
attempts suicide as a result of the abuse) – 207 par. 2
and 3, when the perpetrator acted with extreme cruelty, or when the
victim attempted suicide as a result of the abuse. In 2000, they
accounted for 28 percent of instigated cases, and in 2005 – for
33 percent.
One can assume that the decisions to discontinue may be mostly
associated with the lack of sufficient evidence, however, the
experience of women's rights advocates and the studies conducted
by the Women's Rights Centre6
indicate that the main reason is the widespread neglect of the
problem of domestic violence and the tendency to blame women for the
violence inflicted upon them.

Despite the fact that only the most severe cases of violence end up in
courts, most judges seem the pursue a similar policy. They do not
treat cases of domestic violence seriously and impose little, if any,
punishment on convicted perpetrators. Although the number of
convictions is growing, still about 90 percent of cases that proceed
to trial and end in a guilty verdict result in suspended sentences7.
Even in cases of violence with extreme cruelty, in one third of cases
the judges give
perpetrators suspended or minimal sentences. In the case of
convictions under section 3 of Article 207 (when the victim attempts
suicide as a result of abuse), 66 percent of perpetrators receive
suspended sentences.

In
some cases, the courts interpret Article 207 of the Penal Code to
permit a man to abuse his wife to preserve marriage or for the
woman’s own “well-being.” An Appeals Court in
Krakow held the following:

Abuse
may be recognized as committed through necessity imposed by the
desire to preserve marriage or justified by the well-being of
children or the alleged victim or any other value protected by law
and more important than the dubious dignity of misconducting victims.
In such circumstances, even if violence amounts to maltreatment, it
may still be recognized as not meeting the criteria of the offense
under Article 207. In such circumstances, it may be recommended that
the accused should be acquitted of any charges or that the penalty
should not be imposed or that the victim should file a private charge
against the perpetrator.8

There
are more examples of appalling court rulings, not only in criminal
proceedings. Polish divorce
laws, for example, have been also absurdly designed primarily to
preserve the family unit. Many women have difficulty leaving their
abusers and obtaining satisfactory divorce settlements. In one case,
a woman was refused a divorce, as in a judge’s opinion, she did
not prove that there had been an “entire and permanent
breakdown of marital cohabitation”, which is required under
Article 56 of the Polish Family and Guardianship Code. The truth was
that for a number of years, she was repeatedly raped by her husband,
who was convicted of this charge and sentenced to prison. According
to the family court, however, forced sexual relations combined with
threats and beatings constituted simply a form of marital
cohabitation.

In
many other cases, women who are granted divorce still live with their
abusive husbands, as there is serious shortage of affordable
apartments. This unfortunate situation often results in further
violence, or even in deaths of women. It should be noted that
although the number of homicides in Poland has fallen since 2000 by
striking 40 percent, the proportion of homicides resulting from
domestic violence (particularly the proportion of uxoricides) has
risen from 26,6 percent in 2000 to 32,5 percent in 2008.9

In women’s hell the times are not changing

“The Women’s Hell”
was the title of the collection of essays written by Tadeusz
Boy-Żeleński and published in Poland ten years before the Second
World War. Its author, an eminent Polish writer, translator and
medical doctor, touchingly described the misery and sufferings of
women, mostly impoverished women, deprived of their reproductive
rights. The book, although 80 years old, is amazingly timely, except
that in the reborn, “democratic” Poland the “women’s
hell” has been extended with a new circle, considered to be, as
in an Orwellian nightmare, the family heaven. This new circle in hell
has been created by the Polish state for women victims of violence
suffered at the hands of their partners and husbands, for women whose
rights and feelings are of no concern to the blind defenders of
immoral and inhumane dogmas.